Hey, I said the same thing! Twice! This makes the third time an atheist pointed out that Dawkins was just being a boring ol’ bigot, so we must be right.
Gosh, I hope none of his defenders start crying over the repeated rebuke. Although they deserve it, criticizing Dawkins gets them mad and they start sending me unpleasant hate mail.
Read this little story.
A New Hampshire county chair for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign lost his job as a police officer in 2006 after he threatened to kill his colleagues and rape the police chief’s wife in retaliation for his suspension for having a relationship with an underage high school girl, according to an internal report released last week upon orders from the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The findings regarding former Claremont police officer Jonathan Stone, which came to light due to a right-to-know lawsuit filed by InDepthNH.org, appeared to catch Trump’s New Hampshire campaign chair, Stephen Stepanek, by surprise. “I just found out about it this morning,” he told Huffington Post Wednesday. “He’s been a Trump supporter for a long time, and he’s been a state representative, and he had, as far as we were concerned, what looked like a great background.” Stone, who won a seat in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2022, was terminated from the Claremont Police Department after making the threats. He would go on to work as a Vermont prison guard and would open a gun store, according to InDepthNH, and gave Trump an AR-15 during his 2016 campaign. Neither Stone nor the Trump campaign’s co-managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, responded to queries from Huffington Post. Stepanek said a decision on Stone’s future with the campaign was pending: “I think it will be handled by Mar-a-Lago, in consultation with me.”
Now tell me how surprised you are by every sentence about Jonathan Stone.
The dingbats of Arizona were up to shenanigans recently. Here they are, speaking in tongues before denying women basic health care.
I put this on TikTok yesterday & it now has over 900k views + however many came from the hundreds of others (many with huge accounts) that downloaded it and put it on their own social. Here is a version without any text on it, just in case someone wants to put it on TV.
It’s… pic.twitter.com/NuwxTd30YH
— Tony Cani (@tcani) April 9, 2024
Although, you’ve got to have the right perspective on this bizarre behavior. It’s just signaling to their fellow apes that they belong, and that they’re not a member of that other ape clan. We tend to overlook the weird things other groups do.
Did you know most of our legislative bodies begin their sessions by talking to an invisible being they call a god? They’ve labeled this behavior “prayer,” and most people take it for granted as a perfectly normal behavior. Some few of us, like me, have our own distinctive behaviors, like refusing to “pray,” and it sets us apart and makes us look weird to the prayer people and the tongue-speaking people.
We need to look deeper. What, besides some goofy ritualistic behaviors, bonds these people into a group? What are their goals? Then we see people like Anthony Kern and Paul Gosar behind it all, and we should recognize that it’s not the silly babbling that matters, it’s the bigotry and authoritarianism. We should read that behavior as a flag to the rest of us, too — don’t let the speaking in tongues bother you as much as the bad ideas simmering underneath.
Look at that photo. Aren’t the red baseball caps also a signal? What about…neckties?
It’s aposematism all the way down.
Once upon a time there was Twitter, and it was fine. There was much to dislike about it, but it had the advantage of being the one central repository of all the chatter, for good and ill, and I coped with the badness by doing a lot of blocking.
Then it became “X,” and it was terrible and vile, and Elon Musk is a neo-Nazi idiot, so I left, cleanly and completely. That was a good decision on my part. So I started exploring the other social media options.
I got on Mastodon. It’s a bit clunky, and I still don’t understand some of the details, but I’m comfortable there. I like the diversity of content. Sometimes people are too weirdly judgmental, but it’s not my site, so I’ll adjust. It’s still on my recommended list.
I’m also on BlueSky, which is probably the most like the old Twitter. It’s more centralized than Mastodon, good ebb and flow of topics, and there’s actually a Science Bluesky. I’m sticking with it longer, we’ll see how it shapes up.
Then there’s Threads. I don’t know about Threads. It has a very different dynamic — people take the name literally, and there are a lot of threads, where they go on and on over multiple comments, and it’s beginning to bug me. Shouldn’t you just start a blog? People do write a lot, which is a positive. It’s a Zuckerberg production, which is a COLOSSAL NEGATIVE. I killed Facebook long ago, that was enough.
So, anyway, there can be only one, and I’ve decided to axe Threads. That means that in my head it is now a duel to the death between Mastodon and BlueSky.
Who else is on social media? What do you prefer? Don’t bother to tell me to abandon it all, I’m accustomed to my frequent tiny blips of interaction.
Good.
He murdered his wife in 1994, when I was working at Temple University. Every day, every single goddamned day, I had an hour-long commute each way by bus and subway from my home to the university, and I’d grab a copy of the city tabloid, the Philadelphia Daily News, and read the sordid stories semi-obsessively. I grew to despise OJ. I was freed of that ugly habit when the trial ended in his acquittal — and the only good thing about that decision is that the newspapers and TV stopped being full of trial news. Of course, OJ wasn’t done yet.
The former football star, who later enjoyed a successful acting career until he was charged with brutally murdering his estranged wife and a male friend of hers in 1994. Although Simpson was acquitted of the murder charges, he later served nine years in a Nevada prison for a botched kidnapping and armed robbery in a Las Vegas hotel room.
Unfortunately, another vestige of that era is the Kardashians. I ignore them utterly.
I can see it. It’s coming. It will happen. The semester is almost over, winter is over, the spiders are stirring.
I’ve got 3 weeks to go, and they’re all mapped out. Next week the eco devo course will culminate in my last big effort, to summarize evo devo. Then the two weeks beyond that will be all about student presentations of specific topics. I get to just sit back and enjoy the communication of interesting science by a group of informed students, so it’s a bit of slack for me.
My two science writing courses are a bit less slacky — I’ve got 8 term papers dropping into my lap in the next few weeks. I warned them. I told them at the start that they’re probably worried about having to write ten pages, but I assured them that by the end of the term their concern will be about trimming the 20-30 page behemoth they’ve written down to a tight 15 pages. It’s all coming my way shortly. I’ve got three red pens waiting to be burned through.
Then summer arrives. I have big plans.
Next fall, I’m teaching a shiny new interdisciplinary course for non-majors titled “The History of Evolutionary Thought.” It’s also in the category of “writing-enriched,” which means about half the course hours are dedicated to student writing and training in writing. The genre we’re going to be pursuing is creative non-fiction — we’ll see if the students can handle that odd subset of essay writing. We’ll see if I can handle it too, so I’m going to have to be doing a lot of prep this summer.
Oh also…spiders. I’m going to stake out a couple of one meter square patches of my weedy yard and do weekly intensive species counts, and then similarly sample a few other locations and get a better feel for diversity. I’m going to be on my knees with a hand lens counting everything with 8 legs. I’m also going to be preparing a few sheltered locations, under rocks and logs, that I can survey with an endoscopic camera, get some background data, and then return to look them over in winter. I’m hoping we have a real winter next year, not the dry warm boring winter we had this year.
Before all that, though, grading. Lots of grading.
Also, on Monday, a performance with the Theatre discipline, sort of. I’m not acting, I’m discussing, on a stage. I’m not qualified to discuss the physics, but I think this is more about ethics.
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen: A Play Reading and Discussion
Monday April 15th, 7:00pm in the George C. Fosgate Blackbox Theatre in the HFAJoin us for a reading of Act One of Copenhagen by Professor Ray Schultz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre, Lana Sugarman, and UMM Theatre alum Brennan Bassett followed by a moderated discussion with Dan Demetriou, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Peter Dolan, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, and Paul Myers, Associate Professor of Biology. This collaboration was inspired by Laura Chajet, Assistant Professor of Physics.
Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a Tony-award winning play that examines a meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941 Copenhagen.Though they revolutionized atomic science in the 1920s, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a world war.
It’s free and open to the public if any of you are hanging out in Western Minnesota.
Remember Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman? It’s been a few years, so you’re forgiven if you’ve completely forgotten them — they were a sleazy pair of not-very-bright Republican weirdos who ginned up various schemes that they hoped would derail elections.
Well, now their careers have been temporarily derailed.
Notorious conspiracy theorists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman will pay up to $1.25 million for perpetuating a bogus robocall campaign in the runup to the 2020 presidential election, aimed at scaring Black voters from casting mail-in ballots, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday.
The right-wing hucksters, who have faced numerous other lawsuits and court actions for their MAGA-adjacent activities, were found liable in March 2023 for “transmitting false and threatening messages intended to discourage voting” by Black New Yorkers, James’ announcement said.“[I]n written communications, Defendants referred to the call ‘as the ‘black robo’…and used terms like…‘HIJACK’ the election to refer to their operation,” according to a consent decree filed Monday.
You may now resume ignoring them.
Would believe they’re afraid that people are filling their lettuce with vaccines? Publish one little paper suggesting that plant tissue could be a source of pharmaceutical mRNA, and some right-wing dingbat immediately assumes that there’s a nefarious plan afoot to inoculate good god-fearing anti-vaxxers with stuff that might make them resistant to disease. We’d never do that! Besides, it would be pointless to use lettuce as a vector, since we all know they only eat red meat. Or, it was red until they cooked it to the texture of shoe leather. (Ooh, sudden thought…maybe we could smuggle mystery chemicals into their food via ketchup.)
Getting into more serious territory, Louisiana, the worst state in the union by nearly all metrics, now wants to criminalize the American Library Association. They must really hate the ALA, because this is what the law proposes.
A. No public official or employee shall appropriate, allocate, reimburse, or otherwise or in any way expend public funds to or with the American Library Association or its successor.
B. No public employee shall request or receive reimbursement or remuneration in any form for continuing education or for attending a conference if the continuing education or conference was sponsored or conducted, in whole or in part, by the American Library Association or its successor.
C. Whoever violates this Section shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars or be imprisoned, with or without hard labor, for not more than two years, or both.
It’s not clear what has pissed off the Republican sponsors so much that they would sentence librarians to hard labor for joining the organization. It’s probably because the ALA opposes book banning and endorses literacy.
The big surprise this week is Arizona. The Republicans have a one seat majority in the Arizona house and senate, and they used it to pass a near-total ban on abortion. They got the assistance of the looney-tunes Arizona Supreme Court.
Arizona’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the state’s 1864 law banning all abortions, except to save the life of the mother, is now, enforceably, the law of the land. It is now a felony for a doctor—or anyone else—to assist a woman getting an abortion, punishable by two to five years in prison.
Arizona is a microcosm of what America would look like if the Republicans grab just a few more seats. There’s more that they have accomplished!
For example, the GOP-led legislature recently passed House Bill 2843 that would allow property owners to shoot and kill undocumented immigrants who simply walk across their property. This followed a border property owner’s arrest after he allegedly shot and killed an undocumented migrant walking on his land. Gov. Hobbs vetoed the bill this week.
Also this week, some MAGA legislative extremists were rolling on the Senate floor and speaking in tongues as they prayed for their bills to pass.
Of course, there’s also the usual Biblical shenanigans.
With a one-seat Republican majority in both the House and Senate, the legislature recently passed a bill that will allow teachers in public and charter K-12 schools to post and read the Ten Commandments in class.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Anthony Kern—a candidate for the U.S. Congress, currently under investigation as one of Donald Trump’s “fake electors” that falsely asserted Trump won the state in 2020—now moves to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ desk, where a veto is expected.
Imagine if the federal government were under the thumb of the holy rollers and racists and know-nothings — they’re close to a perfectly legal take-over.
I hope you’re all planning to vote in November.
This is the message a school sends to parents. It’s a Christian school, so it’s substandard bad education, and packed with the baggage of a wicked ideology, but that doesn’t excuse it.
The day before Easter, Pastor Matt Baker of the Trinity Christian Academy in Lake Worth, Florida, emailed the school community to inform them that he was canceling Autism Awareness Week because “the teachings and actions of my Jesus are fully able to do all that this program intends to achieve and so much more.”
“Anything that teaches our children to have their identity in anything other than Christ is idolatry and demonic,” he declared, as first reported by WPTV.
Baker wanted to make sure there was no room for doubt regarding his edict.
“Let me repeat myself just so I am not quoted out of context: any philosophy, teaching, or program that teaches our precious children that their identity is found in anything other than Christ is idolatry and demonic. Period.”
Go to your hell, Matt Baker. Is my identity as a husband and father also demonic? Is everyone who is not a Christian also demonic? Can you demonstrate the existence of demons at all?
Here’s another example of a Christian pastor in Missouri demonizing autistic kids. At least this one got compelled to resign.
Matt Baker is still poisoning minds.
I don’t know why these “schools” are allowed to exist.
Today is the anniversary of that day when people show paintings of the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, and I ask, “General Grant, why are you shaking hands with that piece of shit?” I also wonder if American generosity to bloody-handed traitors might have something to do with our current habit of appeasement to Nazis, anti-Semites, and insurrectionists.
The surrender, 9 April 1865
